How to read contents of a remote directory

[JoeF]

Hey guys,

Im working on a spider/crawler for a specialist search engine. Im trying to get my script to load the contents of a directory into a variable. Similar to how you woud use:

[code]$html = implode('', file($url)) ;[/code]
to load html of a remote page into a variable.

However when $url is a directory eg: http://www.vobe.frihost.net/testing/

You can go to view source in your browser and see the html, but it just hangs when using file() to view it, obviously cos its not a file.
Im guessing the browser is generating the html for that directory.

What i need to know is how to let php get that html so i can pharse the links out of the directory.


Thanks
Hope someone can help!

[hitman6003]

Even when you are looking at a directory listing like that, it's still HTML.  So you will need to take the html, then search for links to files.  Someone who's better with regex can help with that.

What I can tell you is that there is a better way to get the html than you are using:

[code]$remote_html = file_get_contents("http://www.vobe.frihost.net/testing/");[/code]

Alternatly use sockets, there are some good examples on the fsockopen manual page:

http://www.php.net/fsockopen